Few places attempt cultural transformation at the scale of AlUla – and fewer do so with such attention to landscape and legacy.

We visited AlUla on the occasion of Desert X 2026, which closed at the end of February. The exhibition featured a range of interactive and immersive works thoughtfully attuned to terrain: Sara Abdu framed the horizon and asked questions about the construction of identity, while Héctor Zamora's pavilion-like installation engaged ancient geology as an acoustic device.

Legacies in the Landscape Several works from earlier Desert X editions remain across Our Habitas in Ashar Valley, extending their life beyond the exhibition cycle. SUPERFLEX's One Two Three Swing! sits slightly off the main routes, encouraging visitors to move deeper into the landscape. Maraya – composed of 9,740 mirrored panels – stands at the centre of the valley and has become one of AlUla's most recognisable landmarks.

Adaptive Reuse at Scale The Chedi Hegra hotel integrates contemporary hospitality into preserved railway infrastructure: mud-brick walls, original tracks, and an Ottoman-era locomotive sit next to a luxury restaurant in the main building, while Giò Forma's 700-metre shadow canopy runs above the old tracks, responding to wind and light. Monika Sosnowska's Silent Witnesses of the Past, commissioned for Desert X 2022 and built from remnants of the Hijaz railway, has found a permanent home here.

Where Culture Meets Sustainability Daimumah (Arabic for "sustainability") sits within the farmland oasis as a cultural environment combining educational trails with exhibitions, children's workshops, interactive installations, a small library and performance spaces. Despite the breadth of programming, it remains cohesive. The space currently hosts Arduna, the pre-opening exhibition for the forthcoming AlUla Contemporary Art Museum – a long-term collaboration between the Royal Commission for AlUla and Centre Pompidou. The inaugural show brings together more than eighty works from the Centre Pompidou collection alongside pieces from Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East, exploring humanity's evolving relationship with nature. It spans new commissions and residency-based works alongside modern pioneers, from Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky to Manal AlDowayan and Ayman Zedani.

For Futurecity, it was particularly meaningful to witness this moment alongside our own engagement with Centre Pompidou. In 2022, we brokered a pioneering partnership between Centre Pompidou and STH BNK by Beulah in Melbourne – supporting the institution's first presence in the Southern Hemisphere, and reinforcing the role of cultural collaboration in shaping future cities.

Design and the Everyday Located in the Al Jadidah District, Design Space AlUla anchors a permanent cross-disciplinary programme across architecture, urbanism, craft and digital media. Residencies, exhibitions and talks are ongoing, affirming that creative practice is part of everyday cultural production. Regional heritage and the surrounding landscape inform the programme, which extends beyond exhibition spaces into an outdoor courtyard showroom. Alongside it, the N.E.S.T. (New Experimental Salon for Travellers) – an independent, artist-run space – operates outside formal frameworks. Part home, part exhibition space, it creates room for experimentation, site-responsive work and interdisciplinary exchange.

The most delicate intervention may be in AlUla Old Town. A narrow maze of restored mud-brick buildings is animated by subtle music, aromatic scent and small-scale exhibitions. Restaurants and shops along Incense Road Market sit within this setting; there is even a thematic Escape House, co-curated with the local community.

Material Heritage as Framework Across AlUla, interventions are placed with awareness of terrain, memory and scale. The landscape sets the terms; architecture and art respond.